Friday, August 22, 2008

Ugly Loss

The United States seems to have every major sport on lock-down at the olympics...that is, except baseball. As you look through the sports, the softball girls are blazing their way through opponents, seemingly shutting out everyone they play, the men's basketball team played nearly the worst they could in their last game and still won by twenty...but then there's baseball. See where softball has Jennie Finch and Lisa Fernandez mowing down batters, and basketball's got the likes of Kobe, Dwight Howard, and 'Mello, the baseball team stocks it's roster with Matt LaPorta's and Mike Hessman's...minor leaguers. After today's embarassing loss that saw the United States give up 4 home runs in a 10-2 loss to Cuba, the hopes of an Olympic gold were put to rest. This begs the question, "should the U.S. have brought it's best to the Olympic games?" The simple answer of course is "yes." However it's not that easy. Saying that we should have brought our best, and actually bringing our best without problems, is a different story. The MLB has too much money invested into each team and it's players to simply pull them out of the regular season to play in the Olympics. Not to mention teams are fighting for their playoff lives in their respective divisional races. It sounds like it should be easy, but the Olympics are just at a bad time to play baseball. Too much controversy to touch. Let our Major Leaguers play Major League baseball, and allow our future stars a shot at glory for themselves....if not, they could always count the World Baseball Classic as the Olympics...that, and only that, would keep everyone happy without the fear of second-guessing actions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Too bad about the US... I don't really keep up with the World Baseball Classic, but I wish I did, and perhaps I should.